deakinmotionlab

Hi all,
I've got a bunch of network computers that I can use for rendering. I can't do a full install of Houdini on each machine. But I did find advice explaining to copy the Houdini ‘bin’ folder onto a network drive and point each computer to it in the submission script.

This works in a limited fashion. Mantra does start up, but it gets stuck as soon as it tries to compile any shaders inside the ifd. It can't find any of the header files. (.h)

I can't even begin to think of where to try exploring. Does anyone know how I should do this?

Sim.

[
Things I can think of is:
-firstly putting more than just the bin folder onto network drive.
Then how do I point to libraries; in IFD, in Win registry, in Mantra command options?
-Otherwise, do I pre-compile everything and how?
]

Hi,
I'm hoping people can give me there advice on how they make IFD farm rendering part of their workflow.

Over the last month we've been working with IT to try out installing Mantra on a shared network drive. And we're having limited success.

We're using Deadline to do the rendering jobs. We'll submit a Houdini job, but override the output to be IFD's. Then have Deadline also submit a dependent Mantra job.

A computer with a full installation has no problems rendering the IFD files. But the lab computer using the shared install fails when it tries to compile any shaders that come inside the IFD. It can't find any of the header (.h) files.

Currently what's installed on the shared drive is the contents of the bin folder.

So how do other people deal with this?

I am definitely out of my depth here. There's two main avenues I've been thinking of going down:
-Work out how to set up dependencies (environment variables?) better in the IFD files. Also setting up more of Houdini on the shared drive. Though I'm not sure exactly which files. (for example there's 2 voplib.h files and they're different!) Or where to locate them in relation to the binaries?

-The other thing I'm thinking is to have everything compiled before it gets into the IFD. I haven't compiled anything before in Houdini. I tried it out, doesn't seem to hard. But unless I'm missing a great big ‘pre-compile everything before render IFD’ checkbox - it seems like I would be forever having to update all my object and light shaders every time I go to render?

Any suggestions?

Sim.

Hey thanks a lot for that response.
That definitely sounds doable. I'm going off to do some testing.

Sim.